"Tumbleweeds blow around the vacant lot perimeters of highway, hill and homes. Sage colored bushes that smell hot like sex, a woman's musky scent, the dry earthy anxiety of potential fire and fig thrown together in a valley bowl."
by Kimberly Nichols

All my life, mountains surround the things I know. I am running through a desert.

I've seen things here that lay unbeknownst to anything but the wind maker, the arid air twirler, and the dry breeze blower. It's been a magnificent place full of seasonal deprivation, purple wildflowers, starvation and renewal. It's been a fruitful crater of crisp superior clarity. I have seen dead dogs, with skin like tissue paper, rotting alongside the eerie and beautiful exoskeletons of cacti. Of snakes, I have seen long thin tubes of bone like wood and bitter weeds full of milk and dandelions.

I have skinned my knee on the sides of concrete ditches while threading from one place to the next between miles of desert, like concrete roads through land. Running away, to and from, the scars on my body tell a pointillist tale of this world. This hollow gold.

I see a carnival here across the street from my youth. I see blinking lights through the slats in my bedroom blinds. The Ferris wheel twirls and the half pipe stays slick as it is pounded with roll all through the night. I see a canyon full of ghosts.

I crouch, hiding behind words. I have to quit running. I stop in the middle of the desert. I listen to the windmills. A silent and almost imperceptible whip, whip, whipping twirl.

Panting, I bend over, and hold the cups of my knees in my palms.

Tumbleweeds blow around the vacant lot perimeters of highway, hill and homes. Sage colored bushes that smell hot like sex, a woman's musky scent, the dry earthy anxiety of potential fire and fig thrown together in a valley bowl.

My work feels done here. My patchwork quilt is complete. The pyre is ablaze on the other side of my gaze. I open the door and walk right fucking through it.

Crack the ego. Fuck the vixen.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Kimberly Nichols is a freelance writer/artist/burgundy spaghetti strapped Raggedy Anne in fishnets, living in the California desert. She attributes lust, hedonism, the electromagnetic field and white light as pure motivation in her drive towards omniscience. When she isn't glued to her computer screen she can be found dancing barefoot at drum circles, skinny dipping in the ocean, scouring the desert for cactus skeletons to pose people upon or gathering a good blistering drunk with fine friends and sangria. Her psychological non-fiction appears frequently in the alternative rag Desert Post Weekly. She has been published in Alternative Arts and Literature, Small Spiral Notebook and Feminista and is currently at work on a collage series called Girls of the hundred Proof Bordello Define Desire. Let her write on your back with thorns, wine or iodine and she'll paste you on a rusty nail in one of her paintings.